Monitoring/Deterring Potential Academic Integrity Violations
The following tools provide course instructors with support for monitoring students in a variety of assessments that can be particularly beneficial in remote environments. Despite their utility, it is important to note no monitoring tool can unilaterally and automatically determine that cheating has occurred. Regardless of what tool you are using to monitor/deter potential cheating, these reports should not be viewed as proof that cheating has occurred. Instead, instructors are strongly encouraged to view any reports or indicators from these tools as something potentially worthy of further investigation and to combine multiple information sources to make an informed judgment.
Lockdown browser and monitoring technology are available for quizzes and exams.
Turnitin
Turnitin is a tool that you can enable with prose-based assignment submissions in Canvas. (Creating Turnitin assignments within Canvas is most straightforward for you and your students. However, if you do not use Canvas for your course and wish to leverage Turnitin’s functionality, email eberly-assist@andrew.cmu.edu so we can help set up a direct submission of your students’ work.) Turnitin compares each student’s submission against a broad range of sources (e.g,. Wikipedia, their classmates’ papers, papers submitted by students at other institutions, etc.) and evaluates the difference between your student’s submission and these other sources. Turnitin provides the instructor with a report for each student that identifies the areas of overlap within a student’s paper as well as the source from which it potentially came. Note: Turnitin can also provide this report to students, so some instructors use it as a learning tool to help students understand plagiarism and appropriate vs. inappropriate uses of text. If you opt to use Turnitin, remember these key considerations:
- The percentage of overlap reported by Turnitin may be attributed to many sources, not all of which point to student plagiarism. For example, if students are required to use some of the same sources or an assignment template, instructors should anticipate a reasonable percentage of overlap. Instructors can use the report generated for each assignment to see whether the overlap comes from citing the same (assigned) source or from plagiarizing another student’s paper.
- The Turnitin report that is generated for each student is not “proof” that the student plagiarized (Heckler et al., 2013). Course instructors should use the information provided in the report to further investigate any overlap and then must analyze the student’s work to make an informed judgment.
References
Alessio, H. M., Malay, N., Maurer, K., Bailer, A. J., & Rubin, B. (2017). Examining the effect of proctoring on online test scores. Online Learning, 21(1), 146-161.
Heckler, N. C., Forde, D. R., & Bryan, C. H. (2013). Using writing assignment designs to mitigate plagiarism. Teaching Sociology, 41(1), 94-105.
Stack, S. (2015). The impact of exam environments on student test scores in online courses. Journal of Criminal Justice Education, 26(3), 273-282.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.